Am I The Only One Who Doesn’t Care?

It seems like the world, or at least the media world, is obsessed with the happenings in Ferguson, Mo. No detail is too insignificant to speculate about, no matter how wild the speculation. I know more about it than I should, and I bet you do too.

We’ve been marinated in best guesses, wild speculation, hypotheticals and enough flat-out lies to make Tommy Flanagan blush. At this point, about the only thing we don’t know is what actually happened. But even after all this, I still can’t bring myself to care about any of it.

Maybe it has to do with the lies: Michael Brown “was shot in the back!” Well, he actually wasn’t. Nor was he about to start college, or a sweet, innocent child who’d never done anything to anyone. He was a human being with all the stupidity and potential that goes along with that existence.

How he ended up dead in the street probably never will be known. And even if we found out, I doubt it would matter. People on all sides have made up their minds to the point that no story, no set of facts, will change their minds. They range from “Mike Brown was a thug” to “Officer Darren Wilson is a racist who was looking to shoot a black man,” and everything in between. All of which is mindlessly simplistic, and none of which is true.

I don’t know what happened that day, though I have a guess just like everything else. It’s more complicated than much of what you hear on TV, but it’s just as irrelevant.

More importantly, and perhaps more oddly: I don’t care.

I didn’t know Mike Brown, nor do I know Darren Wilson. Unlike many people interviewed on TV, I feel no kinship with either. I’ve known people who’ve died, committed suicide and been murdered, and I’ve felt something for all of them because I knew them. I don’t know these people.

I’ve also been harassed by police, pulled over and searched and asked “What are you doing here?” for simply driving a piece-of-junk car in a nice neighborhood.

I feel sorry for the Brown family for losing a child, and I feel for the Wilson family because no matter what happened, his life is pretty much over. Brown will be buried; Wilson will be hunted and haunted, guilty or innocent.

I get the professional grievance industry and why they’re in Ferguson – there’s money and political power to be had. But I don’t get people taking to the streets. Protesters (not the rioters, they’re simply scum) march under the belief that police are shooting black men like, well, they were black men themselves.